Social Democrats mental health and disability spokesperson Liam Quaide has challenged Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill for refusing to commit to baseline staffing targets and recruitment within primary care services for young people.
Deputy Quaide, who brought to light the extent of waiting-lists across disciplines and health regions through a series of parliamentary questions, said:
“Young people are routinely waiting two to five years for appointments – in some cases far longer – for primary care supports.
“These remarkable delays span disciplines such as occupational therapy, psychology, physiotherapy and speech and language therapy in all parts of the country – interventions that are short-term in duration and not, by any means, wraparound, sustained, multidisciplinary input.
“The backdrop to these staggering waiting lists is years of chronic neglect by successive governments, compounded by the HSE’s recruitment embargo in 2023–2024 and the subsequent and ongoing restrictions imposed by the Pay and Numbers Strategy.
“Services have been left with threadbare staffing – in many areas, recruitment has effectively stalled for years.
“Minister Carroll MacNeil stated at the Oireachtas Health Committee that she could not commit to baseline staffing benchmarks per population and suggested that sourcing staff is the main difficulty – this reflects a fundamental failure of workforce planning and that the HSE has not been trying to recruit to anywhere near the level of need that exists within crisis-hit services.
“A Vision for Change in 2006 set clear staffing and resource benchmarks per head of population – nearly twenty years later, the government cannot even acknowledge basic population-based need for primary care services for young people.
“This leaves families stuck on years-long waiting lists and clinicians submerged in unmanageable caseloads – all while government refuses to define what adequate staffing even looks like.
“Without defined staffing targets and a commitment to recruit, clinicians remain overwhelmed and families continue to be failed by a system operating without serious workforce planning.”
February 13th, 2026